5 Movies About Illness that Can Make Guys Cry

DISCLAIMER: This is not a series dedicated to proving men shouldn't cry, or to suggest ONLY women cry and are therefore inferior. The goal of this series is to dispel the pre-established (yet flawed) notion that being "manly" and being disconnected from your emotions go hand-in-hand. Even the most macho of men enjoy and even shed a tear at films, and the sooner we can admit that the sooner the concept that one sex is better than the other can go away. While the approach to these articles is one of light-hearted comedy, the emotional core is valid. While men might be more hesitant to admit it, movies often times have the potential to make us cry, for example:

"Getting Sick in the Movies"

To be clear, this is not what movies make us sick AT the movies, for that would be a very long list of Eli Roth and Uwe Boll films. Today we're talking about movies that center around the sickness, get up, come one get down with the sickness (sorry, had to do it). Walk into any office building this month and you'll notice something strange; empty cubes as far as the eye can see. The cause? A potent mixture of allergies, pink eye, and stomach flu that comes around every spring. As human a condition as getting sick is, it only stands to reason that our cinema would reflect that. Whether our film protagonists are slowly wasting away from the plague or caring for someone slowly turning into a pile of sludge, illness is something we've all been through so we can all relate. Here's a list of films centering around illness, get ready to both vomit...and tear up:

This is unfortunately a realistic approach to a fictional virus. I say unfortunately because things do not go well for humanity on the whole. Also Jude Law gives us yet another reason to hate Jude Law, and my list was already pretty extensive on that front. The Law of hating Jude aside, this film is a series of shocking events that go from an innocent handshake to most of humanity dead in a mass grave. While Jude Law tries his best to be the villain, reality is the true antagonist--realities of a true pandemic (such as people that would try to profit off fake treatments, supply shortages of the real vaccine, and scientists who only somewhat understand the illness that's killing all social order). Also there's the amazing unpublicized red herring of casting Gwyneth Paltrow only to have her be patient zero and die almost immediately.

This movie scrapes the barrier between what probably would happen and fantasy, but what sticks out to me is when Matt Damon takes his wife to the hospital for what seems like a cold. Several hours later she's dead, and it's so unexpected that Matt can't even process that she's died. He keeps asking to talk to her after the doctor repeats that she died. His brain cannot handle the shock, and that both sets the stage for the film and hits us right in the gut.